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Modern culture is obsessed with controlling women's bodies. Our societies are saturated with images of unreal, idealised female beauty whilst real female bodies and the women who inhabit them are alienated from their own personal and political potential. Under modern capitalism, women are both consumers and consumed: Meat Market offers strategies for resisting this gory cycle of consumption, exposing how the trade in female flesh extends into every part of women's political selfhood.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

Laurie Penny hones her every phrase to a razor's edge. She is absolutely surgical in her anatomising of a mad world. MEAT MARKET is the kind of cut you learn from. (Warren Ellis, author of TRANSMETROPOLITAN, CROOKED LITTLE VEIN, RED)

About the Author

Laurie Penny is a 23-year old journalist, blogger, feminist activist and reprobate from London with a deep loathing for unexamined orthodoxies. She writes the popular blog Penny Red http://pennyred.blogspot.com and lives in London UK.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

This is a good first-time publication by a new young feminist writer. It could have been much better if she waited to publish it until she had fleshed out (no pun intended) some of her ideas. As it stands, it really reads like a series of unconnected essays which she has tried, not entirely successfully, to link together under a unifying theme of "female flesh under capitalism". She simply hasn't connected all the dots here and at some points you get the sense of a half-finished book.

Her discussion of sex work is particularly frustrating in its underdevelopment. Like many Marx-influenced feminists, she is clearly uncomfortable with the principle of women selling sexual services but believes that those who do so must be decriminalised and protected under labour law. Unfortunately, that's about the extent of her analysis, and there is nothing new in it. The shallowness of her approach to the subject is exemplified by her treatment of those sex workers at the higher end of the scale, whom she first dismisses as bourgeois and irrelevant to the majority of "prostituted women" (a phrase that always makes me cringe, with its agency-denial - which, in another chapter, she is anxious to reject!) and then tries to suggest that even they are, ultimately, victims of capitalism too (after all, why else would a PhD student go into sex work?Read more ›